The Ten Loves of Mr Nishino by Hiromi Kawakami

And although quite a few of the women profess to love Nishino in some way or other, they don’t seem to care about him either. Yes, you want to add, but he obviously doesn’t care about you. And to top it all off, he had a steady job with a respectable company. Furthermore, Nishino was kind and courteous. Sasaki puts it in the story “Marimo”:įor one thing, Nishino was quite a handsome man. In fact, after a while, readers will suspect the author of making a running sarcastic commentary on just how low a bar modern men have to clear in order to become objects of fascination.

“If I had a hundred million yen,” Nishino muses at one point, “I would spend it on making the girls I know happy.” But if these stories make one thing clear, and there is, ultimately, precious little they make clear, it’s that these women in Nishino’s lives require a great deal less than a hundred million yen to make them happy. Each story presents readers with a quick glimpse of the lives of the women involved before linking those lives to Nishino after a couple of stories, you find yourself waiting to see how he’ll make his appearance. The ten stories are connected almost exclusively by Nishino’s presence in each they women don’t know each other, and they meet Nishino at different points in his life - although his odd magnetism (and disturbing propensity to be accompanied by dragonflies and other insects) never seems to change. They’re all enamored of this man, and he himself is possibly, briefly, at least theoretically enamored of all of them. The book’s title in English refers to the serial dating habits of a man named Yukihiko Nishino, and the specific number (not present in the original Japanese title) is something of a rough estimate: in truth, virtually all of the women in the book’s ten standalone chapters are in some way or other “loves” of Nishino. The Ten Loves of Nishino, Europa Editions’ newest English-language translation of a novel by Hiromi Kawakami, the author of the very popular The Nakano Thrift Shop, comes to its American readers nearly two decades late Nishino Yukihiko no Koi to Boken appeared in Japan in 2003, and here it gets its first translation into English by Allison Markin Powell.

The Ten Loves of Mr Nishino by Hiromi Kawakami